The current era of liar’s democracy began innocently enough  when President Dwight D. Eisenhower engaged Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, a leading Madison Avenue advertising agency, to beef up his re-election “image,” as they proposed. The first-term president had suffered a heart attack less than a year earlier while vacationing with his wife in her hometown, Denver. His recovery took seven weeks of confinement in Fitzsimmons army hospital east of the city.

It was 1956. TV antennas were sprouting everywhere. No major political campaign had ever employed an advertising agency. “This isn’t toothpaste we’re selling; this is the president of the United States,” complained his Democrat opponent, Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois. This opinion was seconded by the newspaper media. Eisenhower won, with 457 to 73 electoral votes and 57 per cent of the popular vote. A year later the president suffered a stroke. The effects hampered his speech for the remainder of his presidency. (The New York Times demonstrated this aphasia by printing an incoherent transcript of one of his news conferences.)

All ensuing presidential campaigns engaged commercial ad agencies. There was little or no controversy except the fuss over the dramatic “daisy girl” commercial for the 1964 campaign of President Lyndon B. Johnson attributed to the Dorle Dane Bornbach agency of New York. It was broadcast only once, during an NFL game, but the sequence of a little girl pulling petals off a daisy and her counting that faded into a countdown for a nuclear explosion became famous. LBJ beat Barry Goldwater, 486-52. 

For his re-election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan’s campaign  created its own workshop, headed by a former BBD&O copy writer. During an early meeting of the group in a secret room in Rockefeller Center, Reagan popped in and, according to several reports, said with reference to himself: “If you’re going to sell soap, you ought to see the bar.” This was the campaign that featured the famous “It’s morning in America again” TV ad. Reagan beat Walter Mondale, 525-13.

The age of artful, emotive professional ads in presidential campaigns may have ended with the “Willie Horton” commercial for George H. W. Bush in 1988, produced by a non-agency Republican group influenced by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes. It showed Horton as a fearsome Black man with a hackneyed narrative that told how while on an experimental weekend furlough from a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts he had committed violent rapes. Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, who had supported the program, lost the election, 426-111.

As presidential advertising continued to decline toward the verbal level of street fighting, the money spent on campaigns increased exponentially. Presidential general election campaign spending was $2.4 billion in 2016, $5.5 billion in 2020, and an estimated 15.9 billion this year (2024). Half of these expenditures usually go to the media (which are not inclined to do investigative reporting on the editorial effect of this substantial income). The Republican candidate in all three elections was Donald Trump, who won the 2024 election by an electoral vote of about 312-226. This defeat of a Black-Asian woman, Kamala Harris, was about the same as Trump’s 2016 defeat of a white Anglo woman, Hillary Clinton, 304-227. Trump in 2020 lost to Joe Biden, 232-306. 

The nationwide popular vote for president has no direct effect in the American system, and the ad money is directed heavily toward the so-called “swing states” where the electoral votes are not a certainty. At the same time, the truthfulness of campaign rhetoric decayed. This was foreshadowed in a New York Times Magazine article by journalist Ron Suskind about a startling conversation he had with an anonymous White House advisor to President George W. Bush. And I quote:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.^“

The American politics historian Heather Cox Richardson referred to this quote in a 2024 post-election podcast with Jon Stewart. She said, “Now we have a propaganda ecosystem that has people angry about things that are not real. This is the thing that is so hard to push back against.” She cited the contempt  for reality in North Carolina where some Republicans asserted a lack of federal response to the record-setting flood of the French Broad River. The lies were augmented by assertions that the money for emergency relief had been diverted by Democrats to programs for immigrants and gender transitioners. Blaming “those people” for what is hurting the majority, some of it fictional, has been a Republican strategy since Reagan created the myth of “welfare queens,” Cox Richardson said, adding:  

“This is absolutely the authoritarian playbook. We have seen this played out in Nazi Germany.”

(More in a further essay).